The blog of dlaa.me

A few weeks ago I wrote about an "app building" exercise we did on the Silverlight Toolkit team to help test our controls and identify potential issues with Silverlight 3 before it was released. My contribution to that effort was HeadTraxExtreme, an organizational hierarchy viewer loosely based on an internal tool. That blog post has been fairly popular, and I wanted to update the sample code for the recent release of Silverlight 3 so people can continue to learn from the sample and so I can walk through a fairly typical application upgrade scenario to show what's involved.

 

[Click here (or on the image above) to run HeadTraxExtreme in your browser.]

[If you want to look at the complete source code or build HeadTraxExtreme yourself, click here to download it.]

 

Notes:

• I've made no functional changes here; just done the upgrade from Silverlight 3 Beta to Silverlight 3 RTW bits.
• The employee images are loaded from the web site of origin, so if you download and build the sample yourself, please be sure to run HeadTraxExtreme from the included web project (HeadTraxExtreme.Web) in order to see them.

Changes:

• Updated Default.html to include the minRuntimeVersion value 3.0.40624.0 (Silverlight 3 RTW's version number), the new links for installing Silverlight 3, the new IFRAME declaration, and some other minor changes to the default web page body.
• Updated all project references to point to the official, signed versions of the SDK and Silverlight Toolkit assemblies.
• Converted the out-of-browser configuration entries in AppManifest.xml to use the RTW names (for example, ApplicationIdentity is now called OutOfBrowserSettings).
• Updated XAML references to DockPanel and DataForm to reflect their move from the Beta SDK to the Silverlight Toolkit.
• Switched AutoCompleteBox declaration from SearchMode/ValueMemberBinding to the new FilterMode/ValueMemberPath properties. The former represents a rename post-Beta and the latter is a new, simplified Binding syntax based on what we did for Charting's *Binding properties in the last release.
• Updated DataForm XAML to reflect some notable improvements made after the Beta. Specifically, DisplayTemplate was renamed to ReadOnlyTemplate and there is new support for DisplayAttribute that enables the use of the DataField element within that template. (The Employee class was already fully decorated with DisplayAttribute, so it didn't need to change.) The new XAML syntax is just as expressive as the old one (more expressive, actually!), it's less fragile, and it's more concise. Yay! :)
• DataGrid's DataGridTextColumns now also honor DisplayAttribute, so it's no longer necessary to manually specify a header for each column.
• Significantly simplified the code for downloading employee images. (This has nothing to do with Silverlight 3: for some reason I thought I needed a separate thread the first time around - but I don't.)
• Deleted Silverlight.js which is not used by the default Silverlight 3 web page.

 

HeadTraxExtreme was a fun project and I'm glad people have found it useful! I hope this quick update keeps it relevant and exciting and helps to outline the typical upgrade process for an application that targets the Silverlight 3 Beta.

 

Please enjoy!